


Don't Go

by jasondean



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Happy Ending, M/M, non-canon, soft :)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:01:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24362461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jasondean/pseuds/jasondean
Summary: Ash finally visits Eiji in Japan.
Relationships: Ash Lynx & Okumura Eiji, Ash Lynx/Okumura Eiji
Comments: 5
Kudos: 95





	Don't Go

“Teach me something else.”

It is summer. Ash recalls summer breaks vaguely, spending days in front of fans and licking at melting ice pops, the nights watching stars blanketing the dark sky, shimmering shapes taking place as Griffin would point out a constellation-- _here, not there, follow my finger, Ash._ _Do you see it?_ And Griffin would smile and Ash would think about the worlds out there where the bears and the lions and the crabs and the archers in the stars lived. He would fall asleep and wake up on the couch, ankles covered in bug bites, a crocheted blanket covering him. 

Going to the beach. Griffin tossing him into the waves. The salt water burning his eyes. In those moments he could struggle against the current forever, dig his feet into the sand and put down roots.

Summer feels different now. Warmth with no nostalgia. He isn’t a child. He isn’t in Cape Cod. He is on an island in a country far far away brushing shoulders with a boy, sitting in the sand of a beach on the other side of the world. 

“Like what?” Eiji asks. Ash looks out at the ocean, watching the golden waves lap at the shore. He feels Eiji’s gaze on him but he does not feel small or afraid under it. His gaze is like the sun and he is not thinking about being burned because all he feels is warmth. 

“Whatever you want,” Ash says with a shrug. He lets his head rest on Eiji’s bare shoulder, hot against his cheek. He remembers seeing Eiji in the airport, remembers how he was taken aback by how strong he looked. He’d regained some muscle, put on some weight, gotten a bit of a tan, a completely different image than what Ash had been left with, a feeble boy with pale skin under fluorescent hospital lights. 

A scar blooms on Eiji’s chest and he flinches when Ash’s fingers carelessly draw near. It is hard for Ash to put away those images of Eiji slumped over and bleeding, but one glance at his sun-kissed skin, one glimpse of his lips curled up in a smile, and he is able to displace them, if only for the moment.

Eiji in the here and now is a different person than Ash remembers. There is a difference in his stride, a confidence and pride. And yet he is alert, cautious but still bright-eyed. It pisses Ash off when a sound distracts Eiji and his eyes narrow and he pauses, his entire body rigid for a brief moment, because Ash needs so badly to believe that nothing is here to hurt them. Nothing that would further taint Eiji’s view of the world.

Ash is different too. He is learning to relax. He is learning to trust in the lulls that find him instead of fighting tooth and nail to dismantle any repose offered to him. He wonders if Eiji notices. He’s fought so hard to exist this way, in peace, in forgiving himself. Does he notice he is lighter? More open? 

He hopes he does. He has worked hard. Not for Eiji, but for himself. He needed to learn to be okay on his own before he left for Japan and returned to Eiji. Nobody told him so. He made that decision for himself and he doesn’t regret it.

“Whatever I want,” Eiji muses idly. Ash mumbles some sort of affirmation against his skin.

When he met Eiji again in the airport, Ash asked about Ibe, about Eiji’s family. He’d asked if they were going to meet them. Eiji smiled but shook his head, looped his arm around Ash’s shoulders, kept it there when he didn’t tense up at the contact. _I want you to myself right now. Just for today, let me have you, Ash._ It wasn’t a question but Ash wouldn’t have said no even if it was. 

So much time to make up for, but Ash isn’t in any rush. He wants to be still against Eiji, listen to his breathing and his pulse against the crashing of the waves and the calls from seagulls overhead for as long as possible. Forever, even. 

He doesn’t need him to kiss him. He doesn’t need him to bare his heart and soul and declare his love. He can feel it in the way his hand finds the small of his back. He can feel it in the way Eiji looks at him without judgment and without expectation. He can feel it in the way his name is formed on his lips. 

To think he felt that Eiji was his weakness at one point. But to love, to be loved… There’s nothing stronger than that, there is nothing more human than that, and Ash is sick of feeling less than human, of denying himself what he needs as punishment for things he never had the means of controlling in the first place. 

It’s tiring to fight, more tiring still when you forget what it is you are fighting against, and Eiji presents a soft place to rest his head.

“Hmm, okay. I’ve got something,” Eiji says finally. Ash straightens up, expectant.

“I-ka-na-i-de,” Eiji says slowly so Ash can hear each syllable. Foreign but familiar.

Ash uses his finger to write it into the sand. い... か... な... 

“Again,” Ash requests with a pause. He remembers the rest but he wants to hear Eiji’s gentle voice form the vowels again.

“I-ka-na-i-de.” He smiles.

い... で. The hiragana is big and round as if a child wrote it. Eiji bends forward to wipe the first part away with the sand and rewrites the kanji in quick strokes. 行. He’s tried to teach Ash kanji before but it’s never stuck.

“Ikanaide,” Ash repeats. “What does it mean? You better not be making me write profanity on the beach, Eiji,” he teases.

“Don’t go,” Eiji says. Desperate. Longing. Ash looks over at him and their eyes meet. He feels like his heart stops at those two words. “It means don’t go,” Eiji says quietly after a short pause.

 _Don’t go. 行かないで._ The words tumble in Ash’s mind. Eiji looks hopeful and downcast at the same time. 

Ash will go back to New York. He can’t bear to intrude any further on Eiji’s life. He doesn’t have the capability to be that selfish yet. 

But he won’t go, not really. Because he will always live in this moment, and there will always be an Ash and an Eiji on a beach somewhere on the eastern coast of a rural prefecture in Japan. The sun will always shine gold as it dips below the horizon, and the waves will always come but never envelop them whole. He’ll always kiss Eiji, as he does now, with a tenderness that melts him whole. It will always be summer.

He will go to New York and he will know he isn’t home because a part of his heart lives in Japan. It’ll hurt some, but most of all, he’ll smile. He'll remember. He'll be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE correct my japanese if its wrong, im not incredibly good at it. at first i wanted to rewrite the ending of banana fish but instead i just wrote this scene because i felt like in my Vision Of The Ending this scene would happen sometime in the future. an epilogue of sorts, if you will. 
> 
> this is Indulgent and Gay. im Sorry.


End file.
